← Antisemitism in the Canadian Hansard
the coding framework
Finding every statement that uses the word is mechanical. Deciding what each speaker is doing with it is not. This page sets out the eleven tags applied to all 2,837 statements, what each one means, and a real example of each drawn from the corpus.
A word count treats every mention alike. But a member condemning antisemitism, a member accusing an opponent of it, a member arguing that something has been wrongly called antisemitic, and a member relaying someone else's words are doing different things. Counting them together produces a number that measures attention without telling you anything about its content.
Coding separates them. It also makes it possible to ask the questions that motivate the project: on what grounds the claim is made, what is proposed in response, who is treated as competent to act, and whether any of that differs by party, by chamber, or across a century.
unsettled and awaits human review. Three faults have been found and corrected so
far, including one that mis-attached three quarters of the codes.
Section 7 reports all of them.The primary tag, and the one everything else hangs on. Exactly one value per statement.
| Value | Meaning | Share |
|---|---|---|
| condemns | Objects to antisemitism without charging anyone in particular | 49% |
| attributes | Charges a named person, party, institution or state with it | 23% |
| disputes | Argues something has been wrongly labelled antisemitic | 8% |
| reports | Quotes, cites or reads it into the record, taking no position | 19% |
The tag records what a speaker does with the word. It is not a judgment about the speaker, and nothing on this site codes a member as antisemitic.
The line between condemns and attributes carries the most weight. A general lament and a charge against an opponent are different political acts, and the corpus holds both in quantity.
These value names were themselves audited for loading. Attributes replaced accuses, since an accusation carries a faint suggestion of being unfounded that the tag has no business implying; reputation replaced fame as a better rendering of Boltanski and Thévenot's renom; and the tag now called jurisdiction was once called expertise, which granted the very competence it was supposed to be recording a claim about.
Madam Speaker, with respect to racism, misogyny, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, homophobia and transphobia, we are seeing a disturbing rise in all these toxic forms of hate in Canada as far-right extremists mobilize in our country. We see this manifested in despicable acts of hate and violence across the country. Canadians need to stand up and speak out against far-right extremism …
Mr. Speaker, anti-Semitism is real and all of us must condemn it whenever we see it. This individual should not have been invited to this event. He should not have been welcomed to this event. That event was hosted by MPs from all parties. I am always happy to participate in parliamentary events, but we all should condemn anti-Semitism and all forms of hate wherever we see it.
Mr. Chair, my colleague touches a point that touches me very personally. I think people in the House know that I do not tend to get very personal when I am debating issues. This one touches me very personally. I think we are all in the same boat. We are all together, and we are all going to either float together or sink together. The politics of division is …
When someone argues that a thing is wrong, they appeal to some standard of value. Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot, in On Justification: Economies of Worth (1991), observed that public disputes in modern societies draw on a small number of such standards, which they call orders of worth. Each has its own idea of what makes a person or a thing worthy, and its own characteristic vocabulary and proofs.
Their point is not that people are insincere. It is that a claim has to be made in some register to be arguable at all, that the registers are limited in number, and that disputes often turn on which register should govern. When a member says antisemitism violates the equality of citizens, and another says it damages Canada's standing in the world, they are not disagreeing about the facts; they are appealing to different orders.
| Order | What makes something worthy | How it sounds here | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| civic | The general will, equality, collective interest | Rights, the Charter, all Canadians, citizenship | 72% |
| domestic | Tradition, personal bonds, standing in a lineage | Community, neighbours, generations, family memory | 15% |
| industrial | Efficiency, competence, measurable performance | Statistics, hate-crime data, expert reports, whether a programme works | 29% |
| inspired | Grace, conscience, singular insight | Moral witness, the singular horror, prophetic denunciation | 13% |
| reputation | Public esteem, recognition, reputation | Canada's standing, national shame, what the world will think | 7% |
| projective | Activity, connection, being engaged in projects | Coalitions, envoys, task forces, networks (and hatred spreading through them) | 12% |
| market | Price, competition, desire for scarce goods | Economic harm, boycotts and divestment, funding | 7% |
| green | Sustainability, the environment, future generations | Essentially absent here, by design (see below) | 0% |
Six of these come from Boltanski and Thévenot. The projective order was added later by Boltanski and Ève Chiapello in The New Spirit of Capitalism (1999), where worth attaches to mobility, connection and participation in projects. The green order comes from Claudette Lafaye and Thévenot's 1993 study of environmental disputes.
Up to two orders are recorded per statement. Where two appear, the record is flagged a compromise, which Boltanski and Thévenot treat as an object of interest in its own right: the pairings that recur tell you which standards a society has learned to hold together.
Mr. Speaker, anti-Semitism is real and all of us must condemn it whenever we see it. This individual should not have been invited to this event. He should not have been welcomed to this event. That event was hosted by MPs from all parties. I am always happy to participate in parliamentary events, but we all should condemn anti-Semitism and all forms of hate wherever we see it.
Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister 's actions speak otherwise. On one hand, he is giving these anti-Semitic religious extremists taxpayers' dollars to actively promote hatred using funds from the Canada summer jobs program. On the other, he has denied funding to faith groups that want to help those in need. Why is the Prime Minister allowing certain religious organizations to be funded to promote hatred toward Jews, but say …
That's correct—and the Canada School of Public Service. We are working to develop other training on anti-Semitism, because combatting anti-Semitism is an integral part of Canada's anti-racism strategy. We know that we need to ensure that there is a continuing awareness and understanding of the way in which anti-Semitism is experienced. That includes in the public service.
Honourable senators, Elexis Schloss first encountered anti-Semitism as a child growing up in Medicine Hat, Alberta. In an interview, years later, Elexis recalled how shocked she’d been when a childhood friend told her they couldn’t play together anymore because Elexis had killed Jesus. She said, “It wasn’t me, I don’t even know Jesus! It must have been my brother Lionel, he’s always i …
Naming a problem and proposing to act on it are separate moves, and many statements make only the first. This tag records what, if anything, is offered as the response, grouped by mode — because answering antisemitism with criminal law, with education, with solidarity, or with closer ties to Israel are different political propositions.
| Mode | Values |
|---|---|
| coercive | criminal law · regulate platforms · immigration controls |
| institutional | adopt a definition or envoy · hold an inquiry · fund community groups · fund security |
| educational | education · commemoration |
| relational | solidarity and dialogue · leaders speaking out |
| international | closer ties with Israel · foreign policy |
A separate tag records the stance taken toward the response: whether the speaker proposes it, supports an existing measure, says existing action is inadequate, or opposes it. The third carries most of the partisan traffic: a member saying the government has failed to act is making a claim about remedy, not about antisemitism, and separating the two keeps that visible.
Madam Speaker, with respect to racism, misogyny, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, homophobia and transphobia, we are seeing a disturbing rise in all these toxic forms of hate in Canada as far-right extremists mobilize in our country. We see this manifested in despicable acts of hate and violence across the country. Canadians need to stand up and speak out against far-right extremism …
Honourable senators, Elexis Schloss first encountered anti-Semitism as a child growing up in Medicine Hat, Alberta. In an interview, years later, Elexis recalled how shocked she’d been when a childhood friend told her they couldn’t play together anymore because Elexis had killed Jesus. She said, “It wasn’t me, I don’t even know Jesus! It must have been my brother Lionel, he’s always i …
A claim about a problem often carries a claim about who has authority over it. This tag records which group, if any, a statement treats as the right one to act. It is a claim about jurisdiction, in Andrew Abbott's sense, and recording it does not concede that the group named is in fact competent. The tag was called expertise in an earlier draft, which granted exactly that: police, teachers, researchers, psychologists, courts, clergy, community organisations, technology companies, the civil service, Parliament itself, international bodies, or survivors.
Survivors are held apart from the rest on purpose. Their authority rests on having lived the thing rather than on training or office. Whether experiential authority gains or loses ground against credentialed expertise is a question worth being able to see, and folding survivors in with academics would hide it.
I am. Part of it says, and this is the part that I'll relate back, “and harassment towards journalists, women, indigenous peoples, Black and racialized communities, members of the 2SLGBTQI+ community and religious minorities”. I'm hoping that religious minorities, on harassment, would include anti-Semitism. I certainly hope that's the truth.
… irs and International Trade have the power to meet on Tuesday, April 9, 2019, at 4:00 p.m., for the purpose of hearing from the Minister of Foreign Affairs, even though the Senate may then be sitting, and that rule 12-18(1) be suspended in relation thereto. The Senate Notice of Motion Pertaining to the Condemnation of Anti-Semitic Initiatives
| Tag | Records |
|---|---|
| where it happened | Whether the antisemitism described is in Canada, abroad, or both |
| what prompted it | Legislation, a specific incident, commemoration, a foreign event, a report |
| named alongside | Whether another form of hatred is named in the same breath, and which |
| quoted | Whether the speaker is quoting someone else rather than speaking in their own voice |
| to whom attributed | When a charge is made, against whom |
| Israel and Zionism | Whether the statement conflates anti-Zionism with antisemitism, distinguishes them, alleges anti-Israel bias, or leaves the boundary alone |
The last is the most contested question in this material. The tag records the position a speaker takes; it does not adjudicate between positions. Note too that the corpus is deliberately not searched on Zionism: searching for anti-Zionism as though it were antisemitism would settle the question in the sampling frame, before any coding began.
Every statement was coded twice under different settings and the passes compared. Agreement is reported per tag rather than as one figure, because the tags differ a great deal in how much interpretation they ask for.
| Tag | Agreement | Read as |
|---|---|---|
| quoted | 96% | solid |
| where it happened | 93% | solid |
| what the speaker does | 92% | solid, and since re-coded (below) |
| named alongside | 90% | solid |
| what prompted it | 88% | usable |
| stance toward response | 85% | usable |
| response · jurisdiction | 74% | interpretive |
| orders of worth | 70% | interpretive, treat as exploratory |
Records where the passes disagreed on the primary tag, or where the coder flagged low
confidence, carry an unsettled marker and can be isolated with the query
review:yes.
Reporting agreement is not the same as being right. Three faults were found after the first run, two of them by a reader looking at a single record. All three are described here because a page claiming to say how far the codes can be trusted has no business hiding them.
A related fault. Where a coding produced two tiers, a confident one and an uncertain one, both were being displayed identically. Reading the uncertain tier showed it was doing real work: much of it was criticism of Israeli policy being read as hostility to Jews, which is the false positive an adversarial check is built to catch and had only partly caught. When a model is unsure on this subject, it leans toward treating criticism of Israel as antisemitism — a bias worth reporting in its own right for anyone coding this material automatically. Where a coder's own grading distinguished confident from uncertain judgments, that distinction has to survive into the output. Collapsing a hedge into an assertion is a coding error even when every individual judgment is defensible.
What agreement between passes is worth. Two language models concurring means neither refuted the other. It is weaker evidence than it sounds, since they share training and can share a blind spot, and no human has read any of this coding. The value of a second adversarial pass is what it removes, not what it leaves standing.
unsettled queue.